1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to electronic banking and in particular to reconciling account transactions in electronic banking. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to creation and reconciliation of uncleared transactions in a bank ledger for a customer account utilizing electronic banking.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic banking systems are being developed for and utilized by an increasingly large portion of the banking industry. In particular, efforts are being made--by the consortium Integrion, for example--to advance electronic banking services over the Internet for "Web-based" banking. Using such Web-based banking, customers may access their account within a financial institution (bank, credit union, etc.) for bill payment, account reconciliation, and other purposes.
The ledger currently available to consumers for Web-based banking is essentially the "cleared" or "scheduled" transactions. Cleared transactions are those which have completed the clearinghouse function and been posted to a customer's account, while scheduled transactions are those which have been cleared but have not yet been posted. Financial institutions provide no means for including ledger entries for anticipated transactions, such as a deposit which the customer has prepared but which will be actually taken to the bank later.
It is not currently possible, for example, for a Customer to employ an anticipated or uncleared transaction in reconciling the account. With personal finance managers, however, such as Quicken or Microsoft Money, transactions may be entered into a local ledger with an identifier of the transaction type, such as "Deposit of reimbursement check." The actual transaction may occur later, as when the deposit is made the next day. The information may be entered at the time the transaction is prepared, and no further action is required after the transaction actually occurs until the customer is ready to reconcile the local ledger with a bank statement. When reconciliation is undertaken, the personal finance manager may provide assistance in correlating transactions from a local ledger with the amounts in the bank statement.
For Web-based banking, there is generally no ability for customers to alter the online ledger to include information regarding a transaction which has not yet been submitted. Even if there were, when the transaction actually occurs the financial institution will typically enter a generic description, such as "Deposit" or perhaps "Walk-up Teller Deposit," in the account ledger, At reconciliation, this provides little benefit to the customer attempting to correlate the cleared, real transaction with an uncleared or anticipated transaction for the purposes of merging the transaction records. Unless the customer continues to keep paper notes of deposits or withdrawals, the customer is left to match amounts and/or attempt to identify unmatched transactions having the closest dates. This may be an extremely time-consuming and error-prone process.
It would be desirable, therefore, to provide customers with a mechanism for creating transaction records for anticipated transactions. It would further be advantageous if the mechanism included the capability for automatic correlation with real transaction records.